The First Electroshock “Therapy”

     In 1938 psychiatrist Ugo Cerletti was still trying to perfect his idea of inducing seizures in his patients to cure their schizophrenia…a dubious idea at best. He had gotten it into his mind that a strong jolt of electricity would be a great way to induce  “therapeutic” convulsions in schizophrenics to reduce their “tension and hostility.”

     Of course, most other physicians on the planet were trying their best to safeguard their patients from having seizures. Cerletti started off by electrocuting dogs with 120 volts of electricity run though electrodes placed on the head and anus. Yes, he was able to provoke a seizure in half of the dogs…but the other half died from the voltage.     

     Hardly surprising, to a sane person.     

Cerletti then heard that pigs were being given an electric shock to render them too compliant to struggle against having their throats slit, the conventional method then of slaughtering the animals. The chief veterinarian at a local slaughterhouse invited Cerletti to use the electric prods to perform his own experiments on the pigs.Cerletti was able to induce epileptic seizures in the animals, and they did not die from the voltage.

     Perfect. He could now start experimenting on humans.

    The “good doctor” then arranged one night for the police to bring in a poor soul they had found wandering around aimlessly in the streets of Rome. He had no known family or relatives. He could therefore be legitimately “diagnosed” as schizophrenic, Cerletti decided.

      Realizing the need for secrecy to carry out the brutal treatment, Cerletti and his colleagues hid themselves in a basement room of the hospital and posted a guard outside to avoid detection. They lay the man on a bed, shaved his head, and stuck a plastic tube in his mouth so he didn’t crush his teeth with the ferocious biting they’d seen in animals as a result of such high voltage running through their bodies.

     They attached two electrodes to the sides of the homeless man’s head and flipped a switch.

     Eighty volts of electricity shot through his brain for a tenth of a second. His body contracted into a horrid spasm. Then it relaxed. No seizure. Cerletti’s assistant held his stethoscope over the man’s heart. He was still alive. The group breathed a sigh of relief.

       “We need to increase the current,” Cerletti announced.     

      The second shock was 90 volts. The man’s body underwent a longer spasm, he turned pale for a second, and then his body relaxed. He took a deep breath.

     But again, no seizure.

     Suddenly the man sat up and said to the group around him, “Be careful! The first one was a nuisance. The second one was deadly.”

     “This dose still is not sufficient to induce a seizure,” Cerletti said. “Shall we try again?”

     A third shock was given at maximum voltage. The patient’s body went into a spasm, but this time it did not relax. Instead, a wave of spasms began and the man stopped breathing. The stethoscope was held to his chest as his heart began beating faster and faster. His face turned purple. His spasms continued for forty-eight seconds until he finally took one enormous breath and then collapsed.

     “I can now assume that an electric current can induce a seizure in a man without risk,” Cerletti said.

     On April 11, 1938 electroconvulsive therapy began its path of destroying lives. Much later in his life Cerletti realized the horror of the treatment he’d invented.

     “When I saw the first patient’s reaction,” he wrote, “I thought to myself, ‘This ought to be abolished.’ Ever since I have looked forward to the time when another treatment would replace electroshock.”

     Unfortunately, nothing has.

     Since then millions of lives have been ruined by electroconvulsive “therapy” and more than a hundred thousand Americans are still electroshocked every year.

     (This article is an excerpt from our free downloadable broadsheet Shock Therapy).